


Finding True North

by ButcherOfBlackwater



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Marauders Era (Harry Potter), Muggle OC - Freeform, Time Travel, slightly darker Hermione
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-14
Updated: 2020-11-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:01:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25897864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ButcherOfBlackwater/pseuds/ButcherOfBlackwater
Summary: Krista Morgan knew that her family was cursed but being summoned into a magical reality where Harry Potter died and Voldemort won the war by a vengeful and desperate Hermione Granger was beyond anything she could’ve expected. It should’ve been impossible, but she couldn’t deny the truth of what was in front of her. Hermione Granger was going to use her to travel back in time, and Krista Morgan was going to learn what it meant to be truly cursed.
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Remus Lupin, Sirius Black/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 9





	1. The Curse Strikes Again

**_I’ll tell you about it if I ever get it straight in my head. – Ernest Hemingway_ **

**~*~*~*~*~*~*~**

**18 JUNE**

In one reality, Hermione Granger sat in the dry frigid air of a cheap motel room and watched sunlight filter in through the thin curtains. Her fingers carefully tightened around the old journal and spellbook in her lap as she thought over the task ahead of her, and the thought of everyone she had lost strengthened her resolve.

In this reality, Krista Morgan felt a creeping sense of unease as she stood in the humid air of her bathroom. Her morning was already going horribly, everything that could go wrong was going wrong, and she considered returning to the comfort and safety of her bed but ultimately decided against it.

In both realities, decisions were made that would change everything and there was no going back. In a manner of speaking.

**18 JUNE 2020**

**KRISTA**

_To The Morgan Family_

Narrowed eyes, squinted against the bright sunlight, stared upwards as colorful bulbs bobbed in the wind. 

_You are cordially invited to attend_

The white cords had been carefully affixed to the perimeter of the roof, with nails in the thick logs, and the long braided strings had held fast throughout the seasons. 

_Looking forward to your response_

The cheery looking lights were mocking her, as they swayed merrily in the summer sun, and her teeth ground together as she came to a decision.

_The Green Acre Community_

Grass was flattened under her feet as she moved away from the front of the log cabin that had been her home for her entire life, and she was muttering quietly under her breath as she headed for the small shed behind her home. If most of her mutterings were curse words that would have made her grandmother laugh and strangers blush, well, there wasn’t anyone around to hear her. Because today was not her day. She’d been woken up at the crack of dawn by a bird, who had clearly mistaken her open bedroom window as an invitation and her as a Disney princess going by the happy chirping that had pulled her from sleep. Then she’d dozed off while leaning against the kitchen counter and had burned her toast, and there hadn’t been any sugar left for her coffee. She had forgotten to get the laundry out of the dryer and had been left without a towel after her morning shower, and then she had dropped her hair dryer and stared at the broken pieces on the floor while her hair hung wetly against her cheeks. Now there were lights mocking her, with their steadfast bright colors and happy bobbing in the breeze, but not for long. 

The shed door was stuck, so she twisted to the side and slammed her shoulder against the door. She stumbled forward into the dark shed, felt her hand sting, and cursed under her breath as she stepped back out into the sunlight to pull the massive splinter out of her palm. As she marched into the shed to get a ladder, she thought about the final nail in the coffin of her morning. The only thing in the mailbox, other than the actual paper newspaper that still showed up despite her canceling the subscription, had been a simple letter. Because while she did live in slight isolation, in a small log cabin in the woods, she was technically part of a community. At least, the other homes in the surrounding area considered themselves to be a community. She’d grown up attending all kinds of things, community events, and they were all nosy. _Gossips and charlatans_ , her grandmother had said before they left for each event. Which meant that whichever family was leading the Green Acre Community Committee this year, her money was on the Robertsons, knew that there wasn’t a Morgan family left to invite to whatever bullshit cookout was being hosted to kick off the summer. 

It took her three tries to get the ladder out of the shed, she kept getting it hung on the narrow doorway, but she finally got it free. All the while, she cursed whoever had sent out that ridiculous invitation. Both for being an insensitive dick and for using comic sans. Because the only occupant at this address was her, Krista Morgan. The last living heir of the Morgan family, whose great-grandfather had built a cabin for his family to live in so that they wouldn’t have to live in the sin-filled cities. After her grandfather’s death, under mysterious circumstances that she had never wanted to question, her grandmother had reclaimed her father’s name and had even changed her daughter’s surname as well. _Morgan_. Her grandmother had only had one child with her first husband, who drowned in a nearby lake despite knowing how to swim and the weather being perfect, and she had never remarried. Krista’s mother, out of respect, had decided to hyphenate when she got married. Evelyn Morgan-Taylor. So even back then, the Morgan family was only Krista’s grandmother and mother. Then her parents were in a car accident, when her mother was only about a month away from carrying Krista to full-term, and Krista was born after her parents were dead. Her grandmother had honored Evelyn’s wishes and named her Krista, but her last name was Morgan. So the Morgan family was changed to Isabella Morgan and Krista Morgan, until three weeks ago. 

The ladder thunked dully against the wooden top of the cabin, and she shook the dull silver sides to make sure that the old thing was secure before she started climbing up the rungs. Isabella Morgan had been a strong woman, blunt and fearless, and she’d died after slipping in the shower. Her head had clipped the edge of the bathtub, and she never woke up. So the Morgan family was down by one, and now Krista was the only one left. Which that stupid community knew because every single one of them had attended her grandmother’s funeral! The whole time, Krista had only thought about how much her grandmother would have laughed at everyone crying over her closed casket. Because everyone knew that Isabella Morgan was a mean old bitch, just like everyone knew that Krista Morgan was a lazy trust fund baby. (She wasn’t lazy, as evidenced by her balancing on a hot ladder in the middle of summer, but rumors were rarely accurate.) She had burned the invitation over the kitchen sink and grinned as she watched the ashes get washed down the drain. 

Her hand shook as she reached for the string of lights, out of sheer anger. People had barely just stopped randomly dropping by to give her grief casseroles, she was sure that even the woodland creatures were tired of eating the casseroles by now, and then someone had the nerve to send that stupid invitation addressed to the Morgan family. One person wasn’t a family! She was also still in mourning, so there was no way that she was going to attend a friendly summer cookout. Just the thought of being surrounded by all of those false smiles and quiet words that assured her she wasn’t all alone since she still had the community made her want to scream. Then again, dropping her hair dryer and having to force her naturally wavy hair up into the sloppiest of buns had also made her feel like screaming. (If she did scream, there had been no one around to hear her.) Honestly, she should have taken summer classes and just stayed away from the cabin altogether. 

She wasn’t just some trust fund kid living off of her inheritance; she had started at a state university in Denver right out of high school, she was technically in the history program, and she’d be starting her third year of college in the fall. It should be her next to last year, but she had spent her first two years trying out a few different things and was now at least a semester behind schedule. (She still wasn’t completely sold on being a history major, but she’d had to declare as _something_.) She had thought that taking classes right after her grandmother’s death would be too difficult, too much of a strain, but now she was worried that having too much free time was going to drive her insane. It was a fair worry, since she was taking down Christmas lights in the middle of summer that had been up for going on four Christmases. The damn lights hadn’t even worked the previous Christmas but had remained up anyways, and she was starting to think that they were magically affixed to the cabin since they refused to move. 

“If you don’t come loose in the next thirty seconds, I will burn this place to the ground and you along- _Shit_!” 

As the ladder shifted under her, she reached out and clawed uselessly at the side of the cabin. Her fingers found no purchase as the ladder creaked, and then she was falling sideways through the air. Another Morgan, dying a cursed death, and her eyes were open as she fell. Looking at the blurred sight of her forever home while waiting for the end of the fall, but she never felt the pain of her landing. Just a kind of enveloping warmth followed by darkness, which was a comfort. Death wasn’t painful at all.

**DATE UNKNOWN**

**KRISTA**

A sharp pain cracking across the base of her skull caused her eyes to fly open, and Krista shot upright into a sitting position with a pained gasp. Her left hand reached back to rub at her aching head while her right hand pressed hard against the ground to keep her balanced, that was definitely dirt under her hand, and she looked around with wide eyes. She couldn’t really see anything, it was too dark, and she remembered falling before everything went dark. Because she fell off of a ladder. She must have knocked herself unconscious for over half a day, judging by the depth of darkness. This wasn’t recently-sunset dark. Despite that, her eyes slowly adjusted to see a little more. She was definitely sitting outside, but she seemed to be surrounded by trees. The cabin was in a clearing, a very large clearing, so there was nowhere that she could have fallen to put her very close to a tree. There was a quiet sound next to her, like someone crawling across the ground, and she looked over just as the area was bathed in a soft light.

“Hermione?” she asked in obvious confusion. Because that just didn’t make any kind of sense. The person now kneeling next to her certainly looked like Hermione Granger, but there was one small problem. Hermione Granger was a fictional character. So, why was Emma Watson kneeling next to her?

“You know me. Good, that means it worked,” the woman said in a rush. Krista’s eyes were starting to dry out, because she couldn’t seem to get herself to blink as she stared wide-eyed at the familiar stranger kneeling next to her in the dirt. The longer she looked though, the more details about the person became obvious. Like how Hermione, _Emma-whatever_ , was looking rough. Her hair hung down in long tangles and looked unwashed, with actual dirt mixed into the greasy strands, and she looked overall unhealthy. Her skin was red and blistered, like she’d spent too much time in direct sunlight, and there was something off about the way she was holding herself. 

_“Something isn’t right,”_ Krista thought as the woman scooted closer on her knees. She was gaunt, cheeks sunken in so that it looked like her skin was stretched tight over her bones, and Krista actually flinched back when their eyes met. The woman’s eyes were dark, wide and glassy, like she was feverish. Krista felt her stomach roll as her head continued to pound, radiating outwards from the base of her skull, and bile burned the bottom of her throat as the woman reached out and took her left hand in both of hers. 

“How do you know me?” the woman asked. It was a simple question, on the surface, but Krista realized that she didn’t know how to answer. 

“I guess that depends. Are you Hermione Granger or Emma Watson?” Krista watched as the woman’s expression blanked, all emotion was just completely wiped away, and the hands holding onto hers tightened. Krista’s other hand, the one still pressed flat against the ground, curled so that she could feel dirt lodging under her nails. 

“Hermione Granger. Now how do you know me?” the woman repeated. Her voice was nearly flat, but Krista could read the desperation in her tone as her fingers tightened rhythmically. If this was Hermione, which was one really big _if_ , then what in the hell had happened to her? She looked more like a ghost of herself, like some kind of dark specter that only resembled a character from one of Krista’s favorite series. 

“From popular books with a successful movie franchise,” was her answer. How hard did she hit her head when she fell? Was she in a coma? Slowly bleeding out on the ground outside of her home while dreaming of delusions? If she was only imagining all of this, why was she dreaming up a Hermione that looked like she was slowly slipping into madness as her lips pinched into a thin line? If her coma dream was going to take place in the Harry Potter universe, then she wanted to go hang out with Luna or maybe even Hagrid. Tracking down nargles or raising adorably dangerous creatures. 

“Books and movies?” The woman looked confused, and Krista was going to continue to think of her as _the woman_ because she couldn’t seem to make herself believe that she was sitting next to Hermione Granger. 

“Seven books and eight movies, all about Harry Potter. His name was actually at the start of all the titles. You know, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Harry Potter and-”

“You mean the Philosopher’s Stone?” the woman interrupted. The woman’s confusion was even more pronounced now, with her thin brows furrowed together and teeth pulling at the already cracked skin of her bottom lip, and Krista felt her stomach clench as a wave of nausea washed over her. Because this woman looked so much like Hermione, if the young witch had ever been beaten down and left to fall apart. This looked like a Hermione who had lost. 

“Right, yes, sorry. The title was changed in America because Americans are idiots. Still the same story though,” Krista attempted to explain. She wanted to rub at her aching temples, to try to soothe away the pain even a fraction, but the woman still hadn’t released her hand. Krista’s left hand was pretty much trapped in the woman’s tight grip, and she was afraid that she’d fall over if she stopped supporting herself on her right hand. 

“Books and movies, created for _entertainment_.” The final word was spat out, like the woman was disgusted by what she was saying, and Krista could see the jump of muscle in the woman’s jaw as she took in a deep breath. When the woman met her eyes again, her expression was blank. “Do you know the full story then? Of what happened to Harry Potter?”

When the woman said Harry’s name, there was a flash of emotion across her face that Krista recognized immediately. She’d seen the same look on different faces over the years, including her own, ranging from ridiculously over-exaggerated to quickly suppressed. _Grief_. This woman was in mourning and trying desperately to function, to push through it, and Krista suddenly felt cold. A kind of cold that speared her stomach and seeped into her bones, and she wanted to wake up. She felt like a kid trapped in a nightmare, like she needed to wake up right now or else she’d be trapped with the monsters forever. Except, there weren’t any monsters here. Just a grieving young woman who was claiming to be a fictional character. 

“His parents died when he was one, killed by Voldemort, who died after trying to kill Harry because of a prophecy. Harry was then raised by his muggle aunt and uncle, awful people really, until he was eleven. Then he went to Hogwarts, made real friends, and fought in a war. How much detail do you want?” Krista rambled out. Now she felt like the desperate one, because the woman was looking at her with lifeless eyes. _Dead eyes_. Next to the roiling nausea cramping her stomach, she could feel fear starting to curl and spread outwards until both of her hands were shaking.

“We don’t have a lot of time, but I need to know what you know. Answer quickly and simply. Understand?” The question gave Krista flashbacks to high school, where students would have to stand up and quickly answer quiz questions. It was for a game, used as a study tool, and Krista had always done well with the quick quizzes. She usually did better when she didn’t have time to overthink things. 

“Understood. Ask away,” she said and then nodded to back up the claim. 

“Biggest thing to happen in first year?” Oh, so it was going to be a rapid-fire quiz about Harry’s years at Hogwarts. In some ways, this quiz was going to be too easy. In other ways, as she looked at Hermione’s shadow self, this was going to be the most bizarre quiz of her life. 

“Professor Quirrell had Voldemort on the back of his head, and Voldemort was looking for the stone so that he could return. He failed, because Harry and friends stopped him.”

“Second year?”

“Basilisk and Tom Riddle down in the Chamber of Secrets.”

“Third year?”

“Sirius Black escaped from Azkaban, Professor Remus Lupin turned out to be a werewolf, and Peter Pettigrew was the traitor all along.”

“Fourth year?”

“Mad-Eye was actually Barty Crouch Jr., the Triwizard Tournament was a disaster, and Cedric Diggory was killed the same night that Voldemort returned.”

“Fifth year?”

“Umbridge, the battle in the Department of Mysteries at the Ministry, and Sirius Black was killed by his cousin Bellatrix Lestrange.”

“Sixth year?”

“Draco Malfoy let fellow Death Eaters into Hogwarts, Severus Snape killed Albus Dumbledore, and Harry got his first Horcrux. Not counting himself, I guess.”

“Seventh year?”

“Trick question, because Harry didn’t attend his seventh year. The year was spent searching for Horcruxes while also trying to find ways to destroy them. Snuck into the Ministry, broke into Gringotts, and the final battle against Voldemort was at Hogwarts. Harry was killed but not really, Voldemort was defeated, and everyone lived happily ever after.”

“No, we didn’t.”

Krista had been answering so quickly, like she was participating in some kind of paid quiz, and she had completely missed the woman’s shift in expression. She had looked blank at the start, with an even expression and flat eyes, but Krista could clearly see the strain now. The woman had bitten at her bottom lip until it bled, and the dark stain was the only bit of color against her pale lips and face. Her entire body was so tense that she was shaking a little, and the grip around Krista’s left hand was bruising in its strength. As she watched the woman force herself to breathe evenly, she started to add up all of the little behavioral tics. Because while Krista had never been particularly good at paying attention to other people, she had always been able to understand how others were feeling after finally focusing. She was focusing now, and she belatedly realized that the woman kneeling next to her was in full mourning and trying not to lose herself to it.

_“I said that everyone lived happily ever after, and she said that they didn’t. What happened to her?”_ Krista thought. She remembered her earlier thought, of this looking like a Hermione who had lost, and she closed her eyes against the sharp pain at the base of her skull. 

“Your books and movies must have reflected a nearly identical timeline, up until the end,” the woman said as her hands started to shake. Krista thought that she could feel the bruises forming under the woman’s fingers, but she didn’t say anything about the tight grip as she forced her eyes to open again. 

“I’m going to ignore that timeline comment for the moment and just ask what the difference is,” Krista decided. She was really starting to put the pieces together now, the tense posture coupled with the woman’s haggard appearance, and she was sure that she would have realized sooner if her head wasn’t pounding so much. Then again, without the constant headache, she might have had enough presence of mind to completely freak out. Her voice somehow remained calm as she asked, “Harry didn’t win the final battle, did he?”

“He went into the Forbidden Forest, to die at the right time and to destroy the Horcrux inside himself, and he stayed dead. We kept fighting, but we lost,” Hermione confirmed. Hermione Granger was kneeling next to her, bruising her hand and looking at her with dead eyes, because her gut instinct had been right. _This_ Hermione didn’t win the war. She had lost. 

“How long? What happened?” Krista wasn’t sure if she wanted to run away or just run with this, let whatever was happening play out or tear her hand out of the woman’s grasp so that she could start running, but the pain in her head decided for her. She wouldn’t be able to run, not when every new pulse of pain caused her stomach to roll, so she was going to go with it. Ask questions and find out what had happened.

“It’s been two years since the Battle of Hogwarts. Those of us that survived kept fighting, but they’re all gone now. I’m the only one left,” the woman admitted in a whisper. Two years? If it had been two years since that final battle, then that meant Hermione was the same age as her. Twenty. She looked older than that, with her dead eyes.

“So why am I here?” Krista asked her. She’d been taking off the Christmas lights that had hung around the house for years when she had fallen off of a ladder, so did she fall through some kind of weird reality portal? Possibly a time portal? Because the Harry Potter series took place in the nineties, and that was over two decades ago. 

“I need you for a spell,” Hermione answered without explaining. 

“Why me? Did you ask for me specifically or was I some random pick?” She needed some clarification, because her aching head was trying to make sense of this. If there was any sense to be made of this situation. 

“Random pick. The spell is quite complicated, but it calls for someone completely untainted by magic. Muggles have traces of magic just from living in a magical world, so the person needed to be from a reality without magic. I also tried to get someone that would recognize me, so that whoever it was would care and want to help,” the woman rushed out. Everything that she said just raised more questions, and Krista closed her eyes as she took in a slow breath. Okay, she fell and regained consciousness next to a fictional character. That meant she couldn’t think using real-world logic. She was going to have to think things through using fanfiction logic, which meant that she was going to have to accept that she was sitting next to Hermione Granger. 

“So you got me, a fan of a series that’s based on one of your friend’s life. Makes sense,” Krista said slowly. Time travel was always confusing so she usually avoided those kinds of stories, but she had enjoyed reading a few self-insert stories. They were always fun and interesting, and she loved reading about how one person could shake things up so thoroughly. She hadn’t read anything quite like this before, but it seemed like a self-insert type thing. A person dies and wakes up in a fictional world, where they know future events and can change things. Was that what was happening?

“None of this makes sense,” Hermione sighed. Krista agreed with her, despite what she’d said, but she kept that to herself. 

“What’s the plan moving forward? What do you want to do?” Krista rushed out. Because Hermione had said that she needed her for a spell, which meant that she had some kind of plan. If she was using fanfiction logic, then she was putting her money on time travel. 

“I want to go back, to fix things, but all of the Time-Turners have been destroyed,” Hermione said and threw off her current theory. 

_“That ruins a perfectly good trope,”_ Krista thought while Hermione struggled with something. Maybe this situation was just as odd for her.

“Time-Turners were limited anyway, and I need to go back farther than they would have allowed. There aren’t any time spells that will allow me to go back to the beginning, but I did find a spell that will allow me to travel to the point in the timeline that I need but will then create a different timeline altogether.”

“Multiverse theory, got it,” Krista said before Hermione could keep explaining. She had read enough fanfiction to fill in the missing blanks, and she didn’t need to understand the science behind the magic. Time travel and creating a new reality because of the sudden appearance of someone from the future. That was a common enough trope for her to have some understanding, and who said that fanfiction couldn’t be educational? 

“The spell that I found, the very complicated spell, can send me to a separate timeline. The spell calls for a being untainted by magic, from another timeline, to act as the magical core of the spell. The core, _the person_ , is a link between the realities. That’s why you were summoned. Because I needed someone from a different reality with knowledge of my reality and of the reality that I want to travel to. I need you to be the core of the spell that will send us back to the beginning.”

“Back to the beginning? Are we going to go back to when Voldemort was still just Tom Riddle? Or stop Merope from conceiving him in the first place?” Krista could admit that she had a read a story or two about someone going back to when Voldemort was still Tom Riddle and actually saving him before he could turn completely dark, and she was sure that would be fun. 

“No, if we go back that far then there’s a chance that my friends will never exist at all,” Hermione told her and then looked down. Krista had still been able to catch the quick look on her face, and she had looked almost guilty. Possibly embarrassed. Because she was admitting that she wanted to do something selfish. She didn’t want to save the world. She wanted to save her friends. Which, strangely enough, made Krista _want_ to help her. 

“Then you want to go back to save Lily and James,” Krista realized. Well, she shouldn’t be surprised. Traveling back to the Marauders Era was a popular trope too, and she had definitely read her fair share of those stories. So she had knowledge of that reality, especially if that time period followed fanfiction rules. 

“No.” The pure anger in Hermione’s tone surprised her, and Krista looked up to see Hermione looking directly at her. The look in her eyes was dark, so dark that something inside of Krista wanted to pull away, and that feeling only intensified when Hermione’s entire body started to shake. “I want to kill those responsible for killing everyone I know and save my friends.”

“Then what’s stopping you? I’m right here,” Krista said and glanced down at herself. 

“The spell takes a full year to prepare, and you have to agree. The spell only works if you accept of your own free will,” Hermione said while moving her hand. The fingers of Hermione’s left hand locked around Krista’s left wrist while her right hand pulled away, and Krista looked down to see her own fingers move to loosely wrap around Hermione’s very thin wrist. The grip reminded her of the hold used to make an Unbreakable Vow, and that couldn’t be a good omen. 

“Before I answer, I just want to ask one thing,” she said and looked back up. Hermione’s eyes met hers, and she felt her mouth drying out as her skin started to prickle. Cold sweat was starting to bead along her upper lip and on the back of her neck, and she watched as Hermione slowly nodded to tell her to go ahead and ask. “You kept saying us earlier, that we’ll both be sent back. If that’s true, I want to know what our ultimate goal is. Do we kill Voldemort? Or do we save people?”

Coma dream, dying delusion…it didn’t really matter anymore. Whatever was happening to her, she was going to go with it. Might as well, right? She even already knew her answer, no matter what Hermione’s answer was. Still, before diving into the deep end, she wanted to know what to expect from a Hermione who had lost everything. Was killing Voldemort and getting revenge the most important thing? Because Krista could understand that. One man had seen to the downfall of everyone that Hermione loved and cared for, so revenge seemed reasonable. The alternative was saving people, saving everyone that could have lived a full life if Voldemort hadn’t ruined everything. She thought of the Potters, barely in their twenties when they died, and then of their friends. Remembered the first time she'd seen Sirius Black standing in the Shrieking Shack and the way her eyes had burned as it was revealed that he’d been falsely imprisoned for over a decade. Their focus had to be on either killing Voldemort or saving everyone, and she wanted to know which before she agreed. 

“We save people,” Hermione whispered after a long moment. She had clearly struggled with the answer, Krista had been able to read the rage across her features, and her shoulders had slumped and curled forwards when she finally answered. She wanted Voldemort dead, but she wanted to save people more. Which meant that she was still the Hermione that Krista knew from the books and movies. 

“I accept,” she heard herself say. 

As Hermione lifted her wand up with her right hand, Krista started to feel sort of detached from the entire situation. Because the tip of the wand was glowing and then a kind of magical cord started to wind around their joined hands, and everything suddenly started to feel very real. Not like a dream or a delusion, but real. The pain in her head increased into sharp jabs as Hermione started to speak quietly, sounded like hearing Latin underwater so it had to be the words of the spell, and she hissed as the back of her left hand started to burn. Still, she felt like she couldn’t even move as she watched blood drip down her hand. As her ears started to ring, the pain seemed to reach its pinnacle and her throat caught fire as a scream was pulled out of her. Because the pain was everywhere now. Pounding against her skull and cutting into her hand and snapping in her spine and _she’d been so wrong _. ** _Death was the most painful thing of all._**__

____

**18 JUNE 2000**

**HERMIONE**

Hermione looked down at the unconscious muggle woman as she carefully flexed her left hand, but the pain there was easy to ignore. It was far from the most painful thing that she had ever experienced, but she worried about the unconscious woman. While Hermione only had the rune carved into the back of her hand, the woman had a rune carved into her skin while powerful magic moved through her. It would take an entire year for that magic to reach its full power, and she did hope that the entire process wouldn’t be painful. She didn’t know the woman, the woman apparently only knew her as a fictional character, but the complete stranger had offered to help. Had basically given her life up to help Hermione with her task. Then again, it was quite possible that the young woman had been in shock and not processing everything. That would mean that Hermione had taken advantage of her, taken advantage of a woman who had clearly been in pain and disoriented, and there was an old sense of shame deep in her belly buried under all of the rage and grief that she had been carrying around for years now. She had taken advantage, was using this young woman who was now bound to a spell, but she didn’t feel guilt or regret.

 _“I am sorry, but this has to be done,”_ Hermione thought and then reached out. The woman was still unconscious and didn’t react at all as Hermione locked her fingers around the woman’s left wrist, and the woman’s skin felt overheated. _“I have to make it right.”_

She concentrated on the place she had hiked from, it had taken her hours to reach this particular spot on foot, but all it took now was a (mostly) clear mind and a bit of magic to return to the place she had left early that morning. The young woman didn’t stir at being apparated, which she hoped was a good sign, and she left the woman concealed in the high grass as she walked into the treeline. The car she had left behind was still hidden in the underbrush, and she worked quickly to clear off the limbs and other bits of camouflage. She had already used far too much magic today, first by summoning the woman and then again by apparating them here, and she was going to need to move like a muggle for a while. They needed a year for the magic inside of the woman to be ready, and they would need to keep themselves hidden in that time. So she used her hands to clear the car, tried not to think about George giving her lessons the summer after they watched Hogwarts fall, and ignored the tears that fell from her eyes as she was assaulted with memories anyway. She was good at ignoring her tears by now.

Once the car was cleared, she moved back to the unconscious woman. She was lying so still, pale against the dark grass in the moonlight, and her dark hair streamed to one side of her. The woman looked so ordinary, in simple jeans and a tee shirt, and how many women had Hermione stumbled on that looked just like her? Ordinary and still. The only difference was that this young woman was still alive, but Hermione’s eyes narrowed in concentration as she knelt next to her. The woman’s face was flushed, pink suffusing her cheeks and streaking down her neck, and sweat was starting to slick across her skin. When Hermione reached out to grip her wrists, she hissed at the heat as she felt her hands slipping against the woman’s slick skin. She was beyond feverish. What if a muggle from a completely non-magical world couldn’t handle a spell of this magnitude? Was she killing this woman with her attempt?

Dragging the woman across the grass and to the small car that Hermione had stolen a few days ago was a difficult task, the woman seemed to be of average height and weight, but Hermione still struggled to drag the woman’s dead weight. _Unconscious_ weight. The woman wasn’t dead. Hermione could clearly feel a pulse in the woman’s wrist, perhaps beating a little too quickly but definitely strong, and she locked her jaw as she continued to drag the woman across the ground. She wasn’t sure if her quickly flagging strength was due to the powerful magic she had just used on the unconscious woman or from her admittedly absent diet the past several months, but it didn’t matter. She had enough strength to get the woman to the car, fling open the door to the backseat, and then somehow lift the woman into the car. Hermione got the woman settled in the backseat, mostly stretched out, and then closed the door. All without the woman making a single noise or stirring at all. 

The woman was taken care of, she checked the trunk for her supplies, and swept her hands through her hair after seeing everything right where she had left it. So far, things were going according to plan. She needed to move along before someone investigated the magic that she had used, she was sure that a spell that powerful would leave something behind, and she wanted to be far away before anyone started to investigate. She got her hair pulled back, ignored the thick feeling of grease and rough grains of dirt, and knotted it above her nape. She kept her wand clutched in one hand as she slid behind the wheel, and she remembered how fast Ron had driven when they were both still learning to drive amongst muggles. She had always driven slower, more carefully, and that was exactly how she pulled out from under the shelter of the trees and bumped along the ground before reaching the road. After starting to properly drive, she flicked her eyes up and looked into the rearview mirror to see the woman lying unconscious in the backseat. Thought about how feverish she was, her quick pulse, and how much magic she had used to bring the woman into _this_ reality. 

Her last concrete thought, for the next several miles at least, was how much she really hoped that the woman survived. Summoning another non-magical person would set her back several months.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a time travel fic mixed in with an OC from our reality “dies” and wakes up in a fictional reality story. With a few other (hopefully unique) twists mixed in. I’m hoping it got across that this isn’t the Hermione from the books and movies. If it didn’t, it’ll be much more apparent in later chapters. Krista Morgan’s face claim is Zoey Deutch, for anyone that’s curious. Thank you for reading. 
> 
> If you want to talk to me about the fic or anything else, you can find me on tumblr [@butcherofblackwater](https://www.butcherofblackwater.tumblr.com)
> 
> If you want things only specific to this fic, you can check out the tumblr blog [@krista-and-hermione](https://www.krista-and-hermione.tumblr.com)


	2. Temporary Amnesia In Motel Rooms

**_The line between normal and crazy seemed impossibly thin. A person would have to be an expert tightrope walker in order not to fall.  
–Augusten Burroughs_ **

**~*~*~*~*~*~*~**

**19 JUNE 2000**

**KRISTA**

Krista returned to consciousness with a painful groan and immediately curled up on her side, and both hands instantly raised to grab at her aching head. Her stomach took turns clenching and rolling as she took deep breaths through her open mouth, and every single inch of her seemed to throb in pain. She also realized, after a moment of attempting to just breathe normally, that she was shaking all over. She could practically feel the heat pouring off of her and grimaced as she realized her shirt was soaked through with so much sweat that it was sticking to her skin, and she tried to think back. Had she gotten sick? Summer flus weren’t that uncommon, but she couldn’t remember feeling sick. The last thing she remembered feeling was annoyance, which wasn’t common for her. She rarely felt annoyed, so what had set her off? Besides the usual chirping birds that liked to wake her too early in the morning. There had been…no towels? Right, she had left her laundry in the dryer and thus took a shower without a single clean towel in the bathroom. She had also dropped her hair dryer, shattering the old thing, and then the sugar bowl in the kitchen had been completely empty. Those were such little things though.

_To The Morgan Family_

“That’s right! Ow!” The sound of her own voice filling the room caused her head to pound and ache, and her eyes clenched shut against the feeling of something sharp digging into her brain. Ugh, it was so much worse than her usual headaches. Most of her headaches were in her temples, occasionally pounding behind her eyes, but this pain seemed to shoot up from the base of her skull. 

Pain or not, she vividly remembered getting that awful invite now. Who sends a family invite to a person whose entire family has died? A community of insensitive fucks, that was who. That damned invitation was what had tipped her into full blown annoyance, and she had stormed out of the cabin after burning the invitation. Carefully, over the sink, because she didn’t want to accidentally burn the cabin down. The Morgan family was cursed, after all, and she didn’t want to make it easy for the family curse to kill her. Except, she had decided to take down the Christmas lights hanging above the front of the cabin after they’d been merrily swinging there for over three years. She had climbed a ladder, tugged at the string of lights, and had slipped. She could remember falling, that awful feeling in the pit of her stomach as she became detached from anything solid, but then there had been warmth and darkness instead of pain. 

Krista’s eyes cracked open as she remembered falling, and her eyes widened despite the dull light in the room causing her head to somehow ache even more. A fall from that height would have required a hospital visit, assuming that she had been found. Maybe someone from the community had come by to drop off another grief casserole and found her lying unconscious on the ground. The more she looked around though, the more she realized that she was wrong. This wasn’t a hospital room. No bright lights, stiff sheets, paper-thin gowns, or beeping machines. The sheets tangled around her ankles were thin and scratchy, and the only light came from a lamp on the small table next to the small bed she was lying on. The strong scent of pine-sol over cigarette smoke combined with the ugly peeling pale green wallpaper suggested that she was in a motel room, a very cheap motel room, but that didn’t make any sense. 

What if the fall had knocked her into some kind of fugue state? Some temporary amnesia that had left her confused and lost, so that she wandered off without remembering who she was. If so, her fugue state had horrible taste in sleeping accommodations. The only other option was that someone had discovered her unconscious body and decided to kidnap her, and she was honestly hoping that she had just bumped her head and wandered off in confusion. Because with the constant pain and roiling nausea, there was no way that she was going to be able to fight off a kidnapper. She carefully rolled over onto her back, closed her eyes as her stomach clenched painfully, and then wrinkled her nose as her shirt clung wetly to her skin. After a moment to steady herself, she opened her eyes again and lifted her head to look down at herself. The loose cotton shorts weren’t hers, neither was the thin tank top she was wearing and turning into a darker gray with her sweat, and either her fugue self had stolen clothes for her to change into or her kidnapper had changed her while she was still unconscious. 

“Focus, Morgan, focus,” she muttered under her breath. Her arms shook as she pressed her palms flat against the lumpy mattress, and it took several eternity-filled seconds for her to push herself upright. Her left hand felt odd, but she didn’t bother to check it until after she was sitting up and actually supporting herself. Only then did she raise her left hand to eye-level and look at the back of her hand. 

_“Kinda looks like an S, or maybe a backwards Z,”_ she thought as she looked at the red mark against her skin. If the mark had been a fresh cut, she might have believed that it had been from the fall. The lines were too precise though, and the skin was raised like a blister. Like someone had burned the mark into the back of her hand, and that just upped the probability of her being kidnapped. 

As she stared at the dark red mark, the back of her head started to pound in rhythm with her increasing heartrate. She could handle pain, but the ache in her head was making her thoughts scatter. She knew that she needed to focus, that she needed to figure out how she had gotten into a motel room and then probably find a hospital, but it was so hard for her to think with the constant throbs of pain. Her left hand lowered to press against the mattress, she tried to ignore the tight feeling of her skin stretching around the new burn, and she lifted her right hand up. It looked perfectly normal, and she locked her jaw before reaching back and pressing her fingers against the back of her head. She started at the crown of her head, fingers gently probing, and prayed that she wouldn’t find any fresh blood as she started to press lower down her skull. She hissed as her fingers moved across the base of her skull, right where the worst of the pain was, but she didn’t feel a bump. As her fingers moved to trace against the raised wound on the back of her head, her breathing sped up until she could hear herself gasping audibly. Under her hair, she traced out an X that was bubbled up across her skin. Like the burn on the back of her left hand. 

Panic slammed into her, caused her breath to stutter in her lungs, and she started to frantically kick against the sheets around her ankles. As soon as her feet were freed, she gripped the edge of the mattress and drug herself over the edge. Her feet touched the floor, bare feet with no shoes or socks, and she lurched forwards. Towards the door next to a curtained window. Pain pierced through her head as her stomach rolled, and she swallowed down bile as her vision went fuzzy around the edges. Her knees shook as she took another couple of steps, and she could feel her heart beating in her throat as her head started to swim. She saw a chair, the same ugly green color as the walls, and tried to aim for it as her knees gave out. Her aim was clearly off due to her fuzzy vision, and her arm pressed against the seat of the chair as her ass dropped to the hard ground. Her back was braced against the chair, and she crossed her arms over her stomach as her eyes shut.

She was still focusing on her breathing when she heard the motel door open, and her legs instantly raised so that she was curled in on herself. She forced her eyes to remain open as she looked to the side, and she watched as a young woman closed and then locked the motel door. Krista was sitting at the wrong angle to see the woman’s face, but nothing really seemed to stand out about her. Average height, a little thin, messy hair in a ponytail, and a plastic bag was hanging from her fist. She was standing frozen just inside the room, looking at the messy bed that Krista had fled from, and Krista gripped her knees as she leaned forwards to get a better look at her possible kidnapper’s face. Her cheeks and nose were red, like she was suffering from a sunburn, and she looked so familiar. Actually, she looked like-

_“Hermione.”_

All she did was think the name and then everything came flooding back. Waking up in the dark woods, talking to a Hermione who had lost the war along with everyone else, and the extremely bizarre conversation they’d had. The pain had been disorienting then too, but it didn’t affect her memory. There’d been rapid fire questions about Harry Potter’s life, and his life had been exactly as Krista had read and watched up until the end. The Hermione Granger who summoned her, as she had said, was a Hermione who had lost. Lost the war, lost her family, and lost everyone she cared about. She’d talked about a spell, time travel, and that she needed Krista for it to work. The spell required her to accept of her own free will, which she had given. Then she’d seen Hermione’s wand, _felt_ the magic burning through her, and the pain had knocked her out. 

“Holy shit, magic is real,” she whispered. Her quiet words were enough to catch Hermione’s attention, and she felt herself starting to shake all over as Hermione’s eyes met hers. 

“You’re still here.” Hermione’s voice was just as quiet, and Krista tried to stop shaking as her eyes quickly looked her over but didn’t quite manage. It was possible that her shaking actually increased in intensity. 

“My legs were too unstable for me to run away,” she admitted. Hermione flinched, like Krista’s words were a physical blow, and she realized how the other woman had taken the words. So she rushed to reassure through her now chattering teeth, “I didn’t remember meeting you when I first woke up, so I thought I might have been kidnapped. I remember everything now though, and I don’t want to run away.”

Hermione nodded, jerkily, and the plastic bag slipped from her fingers to land on the thin carpet. Krista watched with wide eyes as she darted across the room, and it was still so surreal to watch a fictional character mutter under her breath as she dug through a tiny bag. A moment later, she pulled out a lot of fabric and then dropped the very small bag onto the bed. Krista was still gripping her knees and pressing her legs against her rebellious stomach when Hermione dropped to her knees across from her, and she had to lean forward as she held out a sweater. Despite actually being able to feel the heat coming off of her skin, Krista took the pale blue sweater with her shaking hands and quickly pulled it on. It was loose and baggy on her, so she didn’t think that it had originally belonged to Hermione. She didn’t question it though as she tried to pull the sleeves down over her hands, because she was still shaking, and she took the thin blanket that Hermione offered her next with a small grateful smile. 

“The spell had adverse effects that I hadn’t anticipated,” Hermione told her once the shivering had eased off. She knew she hadn’t been shaking so much because she was cold, even now she could feel herself starting to sweat through the sweater she’d pulled on, but there was something comforting about wrapping the blanket tight around her shoulders. Trauma blankets were finally starting to make sense. 

“The unconsciousness?” she guessed. Because she vividly remembered the pain and then everything going dark, and her next clear memory was waking up in the motel bed. 

“I got you out of the woods and back here, and your fever became dangerously high. I couldn’t use magic to ease the fever, too traceable, so I got you into the shower. I thought the cold water would wake you, but it didn’t. The fever went down, and I changed you into dry clothes before putting you on the bed,” Hermione explained. Krista thought that most people would have apologized for the slight invasion of privacy, but she didn’t need an apology. The woman had done what she could to help, and Krista wondered if the ongoing fever was a result of the spell. Of the magic that had been used on her. Against her will, the fingers of her right hand started to massage the skin around the burned mark on the back of her left hand. 

“Thanks, for that,” she remembered to mumble. Her grandmother had raised her with manners, after all, and Hermione nodded again and then looked down at the way her own hands were clenched into fists over her knees. The air between them was tense, bordering on awkward and full of uncertainty, and Krista pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders.

“You said you remember everything?” Hermione asked her after a moment. Krista licked at her dry lips, wished desperately for something to drink, and then slowly nodded. 

“Yes, everything, but I do have some questions.” Some questions was putting it mildly. Krista had so many questions that it was a miracle that they weren’t just spilling out of her, and Hermione sat up a little straighter but remained kneeling. 

“Of course. Anything you want to know,” she said while looking directly into Krista’s eyes. Well, first things first. 

“Am I ever going to be able to go back home? Once this is all over, when you’ve won, do I get to go home?” Krista asked. Hermione seemed to stop breathing, but she held eye contact as emotion started to show across her face. A little guilt, sadness, but no regret. It answered her question and told her a little more about this Hermione as well. She was never going to return home, and Hermione might feel sad for her but didn’t regret her choice. 

“If the spell is successful and we get sent back, we’ll both have to remain there. It’s a consequence of the spell, you see. It can only be used once,” Hermione admitted. The woman started to say something else, possibly an apology going by the dark look in her eyes, but Krista quickly shook her head and stopped her from saying the words. 

Krista didn’t need an apology. Disoriented by pain or not, Krista had agreed and put herself into this situation. She thought about her home, about the log cabin where she had lived her entire life with her grandmother, and remembered how much she hated walking in the rooms that held so many memories. How much she hated living in the family home when all of her family was dead. She thought about her best friend, lying dead against white tiles, and how she had avoided close friendships ever since. She had lost contact with the people she’d known in high school even before graduating, and the few casual friends she had made in college wouldn’t look for her. Maybe one of her two exes from college would wonder about what had happened to her, but even those relationships had had so much emotional distance in them that she doubted either of them would truly mourn for her. At sixteen, she had closed herself off with the hopes of never having to mourn for anyone again. Now it looked like she had made sure that no one would mourn for her. 

Somehow, knowing that she wouldn’t be missed, made this easier. She wouldn’t have to make smalltalk with classmates and turn down invitations with fake smiles. She wouldn’t have to enter rooms in the cabin and immediately look around for her grandmother, only to remember that she wasn’t there anymore. She wouldn’t have to visit the Sheppard family at Christmastime and attend Mass with them, just to light a candle for her best friend. She wouldn’t have to dread her birthday or take flowers to her parents’ grave instead of celebrating surviving another year. This could be like a clean slate for her. She would still mourn for everyone that she had lost, but no one was going to miss her. 

“That’s alright. I didn’t have much of a life to return to,” she admitted with a dry laugh. She really needed some water, but there were a few things that she still wanted to know first. “Tell me about the spell, about how it works. I want to know what to expect.”

“It’s called _Sanguinem Tempore_ -”

“Bleeding Time? That doesn’t sound even a little bit pleasant,” Krista interrupted. She watched as Hermione’s brows furrowed in confusion, and she tipped her head to the side as she waited for Hermione to continue with the explanation. 

“You know Latin?” Hermione asked instead. 

“My grandmother wanted me to learn a different language, and I got to pick the third one. I was going through a bit of a rebellious stage, so I picked a dead language.” She never talked about her grandmother’s bizarre learning goals, Tabby had always laughed and told her that she was a little bit strange for having so many extracurricular lessons, but the words had just slipped out. 

“What other languages do you speak?” Hermione looked truly curious, so Krista decided to answer instead of insisting on learning more about the spell that was actively using her as some kind of incubator. 

“Started with Spanish and Italian. After Latin, I learned Russian. I was planning on learning Chinese in the fall,” she listed off. Her grandmother had started teaching her other languages when she was young, she had entered kindergarten with the ability to speak Spanish and Italian as well as English, and it helped that she had an eidetic memory. She’d really been looking forward to learning Chinese too. 

“That’s quite impressive,” Hermione said quietly. 

“So is successfully brewing Polyjuice Potion in your second year,” she countered. Under her sunburn, she flushed a darker red and ducked her head. The quiet push of air she made might have been a laugh, but it was too quiet and quick for Krista to be sure. Besides, Krista had always felt like having a photographic memory was a bit like cheating. “We can go over our academic accomplishments later though, especially if I’m remembering our timeframe right. It’ll take the spell a year?”

“The spell, right. The core of the spell has to be someone that’s pure,” Hermione picked up. Krista thought about her highschool boyfriend and their awkward fumble in the backseat of his car, briefly remembered some of the more enjoyable tumbles during her college relationships, and couldn’t stop her quiet strangled laugh. It caused Hermione to pull back, like she was startled, and Krista couldn’t tell if she was blushing since all of her skin was already overheated. 

“I’m not, uh, all that pure? Definitely not a virgin,” she rushed out. Hermione’s eyes widened as her mouth dropped open, and Krista worried for a moment that having premarital sex had ruined all of Hermione’s plans. 

“Sorry, not that kind of, uh, purity. Someone pure and untainted by magic, someone from a reality without magic,” Hermione said just as quickly. 

“Oh, yeah, I remember you saying something like that last night. So all you had to do was summon someone from a different reality?” she asked. Her tone was far too casual for this kind of conversation. She should not be talking about magic and other realities like she was talking about there being a chance of light rain, but she couldn’t deny what she had seen and felt. She’d seen magic, _felt magic_ , and it was either go with this or completely freak out. 

“Basically. The more difficult part was the spell’s intuition. Once I started the summoning, I marked myself as the guide for the spell. It can sense me, read my subconscious in a sense, so I had to focus on _who_ I wanted to summon. Finding someone in a reality without magic that still had knowledge of my life seemed like a longshot, but it worked,” Hermione said and met her eyes again. She had managed to summon someone from a non-magical reality that had read books and watched movies about her life, but the books and movies had had a happy ending. Why was Hermione’s reality so much worse? Was it because books and movies were meant to have happy endings? While real life rarely worked out that way?

“Okay, so I’m the core and you’re the guide for this spell. Why has it never been used before?” she decided to ask. She’d read enough fanfiction as well as fan theories to know if this spell existed within canon, and she’d never heard of it. It seemed far more complicated than using a Time-Turner, and any kind of spell with the word _bleeding_ in it couldn’t be good. 

“It’s dark magic, ancient, possibly forbidden magic. I read about it in a very old journal, that’s written in a mixture of Ancient Runes and codes, and I’m still deciphering some of the notes on the spell.” Her rising alarm must have showed on her face, because Hermione hurried to explain further. “I’ve translated everything about how to do the actual spell. There’s just some notes that still need to be translated.”

“Then tell me what you do know,” Krista decided. What if one of those notes that had yet to be translated was about how the spell killed the core in the end?

“The spell stores the magic needed inside the core, and it takes a full year for the magic to be ready to send both the core and the guide to the time that the guide chooses. The spell will send us both back, because it requires a non-magical core and a magical guide to activate, and it’s really quite fascinating. I’d never even heard of it before finding the journal, and I don’t know if it’s because the wizard who created it wanted to keep it secret or if because the spell itself is forbidden. I was honestly worried that it would require some kind of blood sacrifice to summon you here, the text wasn’t too clear on that part, but it worked without me having to kill anyone so I think it’s safe to assume that it will activate in a year without a sacrifice as well.”

While Hermione had been talking, Krista had slowly nodded along and took everything in. The spell itself was incredibly powerful, had to be if it was going to send two people back a few decades in time, so building up the required magic for a year made sense. She wasn’t quite sure how she felt about that building magic being stored inside of her, but she was definitely comforted about the fact that both of them would be sent back. If the spell was going to send her back as well, she doubted that it was going to kill her. At least not immediately. According to what Hermione was saying, the spell itself was largely unknown and possibly forbidden. Who knew what the effects were going to be? Because it sounded like Hermione wasn’t very sure of the effects, which pushed her into slight concern. The Hermione that she knew, through books and movies, would have researched every little facet before doing a spell. This Hermione though had gotten what she needed while possibly saying to hell with the consequences. She needed to remember that this Hermione was someone who had lost everything and was clearly desperate to fix things. 

_“…some kind of blood sacrifice to summon you here…”_

Hermione’s eyes had an almost dazed look to them the longer that she spoke, like she was getting lost in her thoughts but still speaking aloud, and Krista suddenly felt cold despite the extreme heat trapped under her skin. Hermione hadn’t sacrificed anyone to summon Krista into this reality. (A part of her mind made note that Hermione didn’t sound adverse to sacrificing a person, which meant that she was willing to go to extreme lengths to accomplish her task, but that was something for her to think on later.) Hermione hadn’t sacrificed anyone, but Krista had been falling when she was pulled from her reality. Falling…or had she already fell when she was summoned by magic? She’d fallen from a pretty great height, definitely from high enough to kill her if she had landed in the right way, so did that mean she had been the sacrifice? Was her dying enough of a sacrifice for the spell to start to work? Did she actually fucking die?

She realized that Hermione had stopped speaking at about the same time she realized that she was shaking all over again, practically vibrating as she clutched desperately at the blanket she had draped over her shoulders, and her thoughts were spiraling. Her breathing was starting to increase, lungs burning from working overtime, and did she die? Magic, fictional characters, stuck in a reality separate from her own. She could deal with all of that. Because in some ways it didn’t feel real, maybe she’d freak out about it all later when it really started to sink in, but this was the first time that she had really started to panic. Risking herself for a spell still seemed kind of abstract, but dying from falling off a ladder while trying to take down Christmas lights in the summer? That was something horrifyingly real, and it meant that the damned Morgan curse had gotten her after all. She was just another Morgan who had died a tragic and stupid death. Church fires, drownings, car accidents, shower slippings, and ladder fallings. All the things that had ended the Morgan family. 

“How are you coping with this?” Hermione asked her. Her head was crammed full of circling thoughts, so Krista did the only thing that seemed rational in the moment. 

“Shit!” she yelled and pulled the blanket over her head. She pressed the thin fabric over her face and forced her breathing to slow, but she could still hear her own gasping breaths as she struggled to calm herself. 

Krista had been in stressful situations. Someone had broken into the cabin when she was eleven, wielding a large hunting knife, and her grandmother had been stabbed in the shoulder before Krista went after the guy with a baseball bat. She’d stayed calm, waited for an opening, and then had a breakdown two weeks later after passing by the baseball field at school. When she was sixteen, her and her best friend walked into a gas station while laughing and were trying to pick out some road snacks when someone came in with a gun. Instead of just robbing the place, the guy panicked and started shooting. The cashier was shot in the arm, Krista was grazed on the hip, and she had watched as her best friend was shot in the neck. The would-be robber had fled, and Krista had held herself together and put pressure on the side of her friend’s neck while assuring her that everything was going to be fine. It hadn’t been fine, Tabby had bled out and died right there in the small gas station, and Krista had still been sitting next to the body when the paramedics arrived. She hadn’t cried at the funeral, hadn’t cried for the first six months, and had only let herself fall apart after attending Christmas mass with Tabby’s family for the first time. She was the one who found her grandmother’s body, slumped down in the bathtub, and she had covered her grandmother with a towel before calling 9-1-1. After her grandmother’s body was taken away, she cleaned the blood out of the bathtub and then went to sleep so that she could call the funeral home the next morning.

The blanket slipped off the top of her head, some hair clung to her forehead and cheeks, and she pushed out a breath. The shaking had died down, but she thought the heat inside of her had increased. It sort of felt like she was boiling inside, but she was starting to feel a bit more calm. A little more centered. She had survived stressful situations; it was possible that she had died yesterday, but she had survived that too. She was still here. Pulling breath into her lungs, blood rushing through her veins, heart beating a strong rhythm in her chest, and able to think for herself. If anything, the pain throbbing throughout her body let her know that she was alive. She felt the blanket slip down to lodge between her shoulders and the chair that was still keeping her upright, and she met Hermione’s eyes as she took another slow breath. 

“Sorry about that,” she said as she exhaled. 

“You’re allowed to feel overwhelmed,” Hermione assured her. Which was kind of her and everything, but Krista still needed to explain _why_ she had decided to suddenly freak out. Just in case it turned out to be important to the plan later on. 

“I’m sure that I will have a complete breakdown at some point, but we will worry about that when the time comes. This little moment was because of what you said at the end,” she said in an attempt to explain. In an attempt to start to explain. 

“I didn’t sacrifice anyone, so I’m sure that we won’t have to sacrifice anyone when the spell is complete either,” Hermione said quickly. She seemed relieved about that, which just made what Krista needed to tell her a little more difficult to do. 

“About that.” Now that she wasn’t holding onto the blanket, her hands gripped restlessly at her raised knees. Squeeze, release, inhale. Squeeze, release, exhale. “Before I woke up in the woods with you, I fell off a ladder. So, there’s a slight chance that I might have died just as you summoned me.”

“Well, that could complicate things,” Hermione said slowly. 

“Complicate things by having to sacrifice someone?” Krista questioned. Different realities, time travel, magic. Whatever, she was handling it. Human sacrifice? That seemed like a bit much. Unless they could find a serial killer or something. Was it still morally wrong to kill a serial killer?

“I’m not sure.” Hermione looked unsure as well, looking down at the floor and biting at her bottom lip, and that really didn’t bode well. 

“We’ll worry about it a year from now,” Krista sighed and let her head fall back. The ceiling was ordinary, nothing special, and she felt her brows pulling together as she realized that they were going to have to spend a year waiting for this spell to end. So she lifted her head and asked, “What’s our plan moving forward?”

“This is already my third day in this room. We’ll need to leave tomorrow,” was Hermione’s immediate answer. Wasn’t really the answer that Krista had been looking for, but it was a start. 

“After that? What do we do for the next year?” Krista clarified. Hermione got a sort of faraway look in her eyes, as if she was just now starting to plan, and Krista pulled her knees in tighter against her body. 

“We need to get farther away from here, and we’ll have to stay hidden,” Hermione said slowly. 

“Then we’ll head north and live like muggles,” Krista suggested. She was pretty sure that she was still a muggle. Magic might be building up inside of her, but she didn’t feel like she could suddenly pick up a wand and start doing spells of her own. 

Hermione was looking down at her knees, apparently lost in thought, and Krista let her head fall back again. She was still hurting all over, deep throbbing aches, and she wondered if that was because of the fall or because of the magic. The fever had to be because of the magic, because falling off a ladder wouldn’t give her a fever. She really hoped that the fever would calm down soon, the sweat drenching her was really starting to get on her nerves, and she carefully crossed her arms over her stomach. A different reality, fictional characters, possible human sacrifices…how had everything turned upside down so fast? All she had wanted to do was take down some Christmas lights, and now she was sitting across from a Hermione Granger who was both exactly like the character she’d watched in movies while simultaneously being absolutely nothing like the character at all. It was enough to make her stomach rumble. No, wait, that didn’t make any sense. Why was her stomach growling?

“The food!” Hermione whispered and started moving. Krista looked up to see the other woman crawling across the floor, over to where she had dropped a plastic bag when she had first noticed Krista, and she carefully moved back to where Krista was still sitting by walking on her knees. 

Hermione sat down properly across from her, close enough that Krista could reach out and touch her if she wanted to, and she pulled her legs in as tight as possible as she watched her dig around inside of the crinkling plastic bag. When Hermione offered her a sandwich wrapped in cellophane and a bottle of water, she smiled in thanks and reached out with both hands to take what was offered. She balanced the sandwich on her knees and quickly twisted the cap off of the water, and she drank down half of the bottle in one go. It still didn’t seem like enough, but she lowered the bottle anyway and replaced the cap before sitting the bottle on the floor next to her. Her hands were steady as she picked up the sandwich and started to unwrap the plastic, and her eyes scanned the sticker serving as a label as she worked at freeing the sandwich. It claimed to be a turkey and cheese sandwich, and her eyes scanned over the sell-by date and then quickly did a double take. 

_06/24/00_

That couldn’t possibly be right. There was no way that this sandwich was twenty years old; she couldn’t eat a sandwich that was the same age as she was, and the sandwich was only halfway unwrapped when she looked across the small space at Hermione. She was already biting into her sandwich and hadn’t died on the spot, so the sandwich wasn’t old. Then as she continued to look at Hermione, it finally hit her. The Battle of Hogwarts had been in ’98, and Hermione said that had been two years ago. So not only had she been summoned into a different reality, but she had also been transported back twenty years. Reality travel, time travel, and magic building inside of her? It was no wonder that she felt like she’d been hit by a truck, and it explained why her body was so out of whack and overheating.

“What’s the date?” she decided to ask after a moment. Hermione hurriedly finished chewing her bite of food and swallowed, and Krista tapped her fingers against her own partially wrapped sandwich as she waited. 

“June nineteenth.” Krista raised a brow in question, because she needed the full date. Not just the month and day. Hermione must have realized that because she answered without Krista having to explicitly ask. “2000.”

“Two…thousand,” Krista whispered slowly and then sighed. 

“What year are you from?” Hermione asked her. Krista’s fingers were shaking a little as she finished unwrapping her sandwich, and she held it up in front of her face as she answered. 

“Twenty-twenty,” she said and then immediately took a large bite. The sandwich was dry, but it tasted like turkey so she could overlook that. Focusing on the sandwich was also easier than focusing on Hermione’s wide eyes, but the other woman looked away from her after a moment and didn’t say anything.

The two of them ate in silence, so that the only sound in the room came from their quiet chewing and the crinkling of plastic water bottles. Krista tried not to think, tried to shut her mind off so that she could just eat and worry about everything else when she was a bit more clear-minded, but stopping her own thoughts wasn’t that easy. She kept getting stuck on the date. June nineteenth, a few months before her first birthday. Was there a baby version of her out there somewhere? Was her best friend still alive and waiting to meet her in kindergarten? It was too late for her parents, but could she send her grandmother a postcard and tell her to be careful in the shower? She thought and she chewed, she chewed and she thought, and all of her questions started circling as she finished the first half of her sandwich. 

“Is there a baby version of me in this reality?” The question seemed to slip out of her as she raised up the second half of the sandwich, and Hermione’s brows pulled in tight as she chewed a little slower. That meant she had to know the answer and was stalling, but Krista waited patiently as she took another bite of her sandwich. 

“The spell was actually very clear about that. You can only exist in one reality at a time. You are here, so another version of you can’t exist in this reality,” Hermione explained quietly. That made sense, she supposed. It wasn’t like she could take the risk of running into herself.

“When we go back, will it be the same for you?” she asked. Hermione’s eyes were wide and dark, and her sandwich was completely gone. So there was no way for her to stall. 

“Yes.” It was a simple answer, but there was no way that it could feel simple. Hermione was basically choosing to erase her original existence, just to ensure that Voldemort would be defeated and that everyone else would survive. How would Harry and Ron survive without a Hermione to keep them in check? Then again, if Hermione succeeded (if they succeeded), Harry and Ron wouldn’t be in constant danger after reaching Hogwarts. 

The pounding in her head increased with a vengeance, like her headache was pissed at her for focusing on anything other than the pain, and she had to squint to focus on rewrapping the last quarter of her sandwich. Because as the pain became worse, her stomach soured to the point where continuing to eat seemed like a horrible idea. So she wrapped her leftovers, drank down the rest of her water, and then leaned her head back against the chair again. She slumped down a little, it felt like her body was starting to give out on her, and the pain was steady now. Just waves of agony starting in the base of her skull and spreading out across her entire body. The only good thing about the pain? She couldn’t think of anything else, and there was some relief to not thinking about the crazy situation she was now in. So she gave into the pain, accepted it and nearly welcomed it, and closed her eyes as she slumped fully against the chair.

**HERMIONE**

Across from her, the young woman sagged bonelessly against the chair and groaned low in her throat. The water bottle on the floor next to her was empty, she had eaten most of her sandwich and what was left of it was wrapped in plastic, and Hermione took a moment to study her while her eyes were closed. She didn’t fully understand how the woman was going along with all of this; she had been yanked out of her own life and was now trapped in a reality that she probably thought of as a fictional world, but she was somehow staying calm and going along with everything. The closest she had come to breaking down was when she thought she might have died, which was perfectly reasonable, and that was a realization that Hermione was worried about. What if the woman had died, and that was the sacrifice that the spell accepted? Did that mean she would have to sacrifice someone in a year? Once they got somewhere safe, she would need to start reading the journal again.

The woman groaned again, quietly but still full of pain, and Hermione listened to her knees pop as she hurriedly stood up. She gathered up their trash and then disposed of it, placed the woman’s mostly eaten sandwich back inside the plastic bag, and then stood next to where the woman was sitting. The hair at her temples looked black, darkened by the sweat visible on her skin, and she trembled every few moments. Her fever was still too high, but Hermione wasn’t sure what she could do to lower it. Magic was a possibility, but she wanted that to be a last resort. The woman also looked exhausted, and Hermione quietly cleared her throat to get her attention. Her eyes cracked open, and she looked up at Hermione with dull dark eyes for a long moment before a bit of clarity entered her gaze. Hermione extended a hand towards her, and she couldn’t ignore the heat of the woman’s hand or the way her hand continued to shake even after their hands locked. 

Hermione pulled the woman to her feet and then immediately moved closer when the woman started to slide back towards the ground. It was lucky that they were nearly the same height, she thought she might possibly be an inch or so taller, but it was easy to get the woman’s arm around her shoulders so that she could support her. The woman tried not to put too much of her weight on her, and they stumbled across the room towards the bed. Hermione’s bag was still lying at the end of the bed, so she carefully helped the woman sit on the edge of the bed. Before she could move her bag, the woman started to fall backwards. Hermione reacted on instinct, grabbed the woman’s shoulders and held her upright, and she helped her to turn so that she could lay her head on the pillow. She was twisted awkwardly at the hips, so Hermione moved down and lifted the woman’s legs up onto the bed. 

“I hate asking, but would you mind helping me?” the woman asked in a quiet whisper. Before Hermione could ask what she needed help with, she noticed the woman pulling at the bottom of the sweater. “I just can’t seem to cool off.”

“I think that’s just your body reacting to the magic. It should ease off soon,” Hermione told her. The woman managed to lift herself in intervals so that Hermione could peel the sweater off of her, and the tank top under it was darkened with sweat. She dropped the sweater at the end of the bed, made a mental note to wash it in the motel sink before they left, and then slowly lowered herself down to sit on the edge of the bed next to the woman. 

“Sure hope so. I don’t want to be the gross sweaty person in the room for the rest of my life,” the woman said and then laughed quietly. Just that little bit of movement and sound caused her to wince in pain, and Hermione felt guilt for hurting an innocent stranger but still couldn’t seem to feel regret for what she’d done. 

“Can I ask you something?” Hermione tried not to think about how some people would have responded to that, and she only managed to succeed because the woman forced her eyes to open again. Hermione couldn’t tell the exact color, just that her eyes were dark and a little glassy from the continuous fever. 

“Anything,” the woman said and smiled a little. 

_Why did you agree to this?_

_How are you staying so calm?_

_When will you hate me for stealing your life from you?_

“What’s your name?” she asked instead of all the other questions that she wanted to ask. The woman smiled again, just barely, and kept her eyes open as she answered. 

“Krista Morgan,” she whispered and then let her eyes close. Her body sagged and went completely limp, unconscious again, and Hermione remained seated on the edge of the bed and watched as the woman breathed in quick pain-filled gasps. 

_“Thank you for helping me, Krista Morgan.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I meant to update this sooner, this has been written for quite a while, but life got in the way. I am still working on this story, and a huge part of it has already been extensively planned out. It’s a bit ridiculous how many future scenes have been written, but I’m so excited to keep writing this story. Next up, there’s going to be some Krista and Hermione bonding as they wait a year for the spell to be ready. I’m not sure how many chapters that will take, sometimes I write more than I plan to, but they’ll time travel after that. 
> 
> For this chapter, I just wanted the two of them sitting across from each other and talking. If Krista seems a little too calm about what’s happening, please remember that she is still grieving her grandmother (the person who raised her) and that she’s in a little bit of shock. It’s also important to remember, from this point on, that this isn’t the exact same Hermione from the books/movies. So she will occasionally do things that seem out of character, but all of her actions are perfectly in character for what she’s been through. More of that will be explained during the bonding chapter(s). If there’s anything you have a question about, please ask. I always love talking about my stories and I especially love talking about Harry Potter.


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